The pens at their Gunn Hill West Dairy are now empty - the cows sent off to slaughter, along with the couple's dreams.

"You just wish things had turned out differently," said Mike Cherniske, a fourth-generation dairyman who earlier this month watched with quiet sadness as his cows were loaded onto the trucks that would take them away. "You work all your life, then things beyond your control take over."

Ten years ago, the Cherniskes moved from Connecticut to Utah in search of a place where cows and dairies still were welcome. From the first day, they felt at home in Delta, recounting warmly how strangers driving by stopped to help them unload.

Yet, almost from the beginning, they also sensed something was wrong.

Too many of their animals were getting sick, and some were dying of ailments that should have been treatable. It was a mystery, they discovered, that also plagued other dairies in western Millard County.

After years of desperately trying to curb the losses, the Cherniskes and other dairy farmers came to blame the loss of thousands of their cows on electrical currents surging through the ground from the nearby coal-fired power plant.

Cherniske claimed that after things suddenly got better at his farm in February 2002, he discovered one of the turbines at the Intermountain Power Project (IPP) was shut down. But a week after they turned the turbine back on, the problems returned and his sick pen was full again.

An expert brought in by the farmers to test for stray voltage found Cherniske's farm and those of other Delta-area farmers alive with direct current - the type of electricity the IPP transmits over power lines to the Los Angeles area.

However, the operator of the IPP plant - the Intermountain Power Agency (IPA) - remains convinced that no stray electricity from the facility has made its way to the dairies.

"We've done everything we could think of to try and find out if there is a problem," said Reed Searle, general manager of the IPA. "We've spent tons of money on physicists, electric generation and transmission specialists, and we haven't found anything."

After years of this back-and-forth, the Utah farms, along with several California dairy operations whose farms are at the end of an IPP power-transmission line in that state, decided to take action.

In late 2003, they filed a lawsuit in the Superior Court of California in Los Angeles against the IPA, and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which takes nearly 45 percent of the electricity generated by the massive facility in Millard County.

They contend that the plant's design is faulty, causing unwanted electricity to stray into the ground and aquifers beneath their farms. And that electricity, they asserted, was compromising their animals' immune systems.

"A lot of us continue to deal with those [cow] health problems," said John Nye, another Delta-area dairy farmer. "But part of being in the agricultural industry is that no matter what, you always hope that things will work out."

For the Cherniskes, it didn't.

Milk prices, the lifeblood of dairy farmers, have fallen in recent years, and a verdict in the lawsuit they hoped would help them was stalled by a long legal battle that eventually resulted in the dispute being taken out of the California court and moved to state court in Fillmore.

"We knew it would be a long and technical case when we started," said Suzzelle Smith, a Los Angeles attorney representing the farms. "But when you hear about someone going out of business, the tragedy really hits home."

Crell Bagley, a veterinarian for the USU Extension Service, said in an interview in 2003 that cows can be sensitive to electricity and that some studies suggest that stray voltage can cause problems similar to those the Delta and California dairy farmers complain about.

Yet he explained at that time that those studies involved cows affected by alternating current produced by equipment, such as milking machines, that was not grounded properly.

About the same time, a representative for a Florida firm that provides health and safety information to the beef cattle industry said most of the evidence suggesting that cows might be affected by high-tension power lines was anecdotal at best.

"There is nothing magical about a cow," Bill Mies, an executive with eMerge Interactive, said in 2003. "If that electricity was affecting cows, you would also expect that they would be finding an unusually large number of deer, coyotes and rabbits dead in the area. And if that electricity is enough to kill a 1,000-pound cow, a 150-pound man would not seem to have much of a chance, either."

With the lawsuit still pending, investigators from both sides continue to wander the dairies and dairy farms near the power plant, looking for telltale signs of stray electricity or the lack of it, while lawyers search documents for any evidence that might aid their cases.

Attorneys for the farmers recently sent an investigator to Sweden. They wanted him to look into the manufacture of the "rectifiers" that convert the alternating-current electricity produced at IPP into direct current that is transmitted to Los Angeles. Rectifiers on the other end of the direct-current line then convert the power back to alternating current, the type of electricity typically used in homes and businesses.

"We think that maybe the rectifiers will be one of the smoking guns," attorney Smith said.

Yet for Linda Cherniske, who worked side by side with her husband, the thought of the lawsuits eventually making their way to trial is little comfort. These days, the thought of losing their dairy is enough to move her to tears.

"This shouldn't be happening," she said as she recently watched another truckload of their livestock pull away. "We were good dairymen."

steve@sltrib.com